Aurore Coutelier - 3D Environment & Lighting
This year marked a new chapter in my 3D journey. I started studying RealTime 3D & Virtual Production at CGSpectrum and discovered a whole new world. My objective was to build worlds; telling stories with environments and atmosphere has now become a real passion, so I hope you'll enjoy it.
The Last Voyage was created in Unreal Engine 5 as part of my first term in Realtime3D & Virtual Production at CG Spectrum.
The Last Voyage concept came from a wish to bring my stylised art into a realistic world. I had been playing the Supergiant Games game Hades and started wondering what the River Styx could look like in a fantasy/fairy tale world. I thought that the challenge of balancing a moody yet magical atmosphere would be really interesting.
While always keeping the story in mind, my focus was on composition, lighting, atmosphere, and cinematic approach. In order to keep my time focused on those key elements, I was able to use the Quixel Library and the Unreal free Marketplace as my main source to gather 3D assets. It was then easy to either customise them in Blender or Unreal Engine as required.
Process Breakdown
Lighting
As I mentioned before, lighting was a really big focus on this project. I see lighting as the soul of my projects and believe it is a key element to convey a story, along with atmosphere. In this case I wanted to tell the story of the last voyage. I wanted to follow Charon on his journey to hell; having grown up watching Disney and Harry Potter movies though, I wanted hell to be eerie but still magical.
Shaders Highlight
Shader controls was a very important part of the process from the very beginning. I spent a lot of time on a master material that would give me the option to have full artistic control over the scene. In this example, you can see the emission controls over the plants. The type of emission as well as location, colour and intensity were different on every plant but controlled through the one shader material. This made for a very smooth aesthetic direction workflow down the road.
On the other end of the process, the caustic shader was one of the last and most fun addition to the project. The water reflection on the rocks were added using an animated decal I made using textures panning in different directions with a few effects added to them. The use of decals for VFX was quite eye opening in terms of possibilities, and a good general summary of my introduction to 3D to date. Anything is possible, and there is a thousand ways to make it happen, but most importantly the solution doesn't always have to be super complicated as long as it helps you tell your story.
Trick or Treat was a shorter project realised for the Creep it Reel Challenge organised by Epic Games at Halloween. This project was a chance for me to confirm my new learned skills and lessons learned from my previous projects.
It has been a lot of fun to see my work evolve and translate into a more realistic style, and to be able to identify my influences through my projects. I am passionate about storytelling and am thrilled to keep learning new ways to do so.
Lighting
Setting the mood with lighting and atmosphere was once more a priority, which is where I spent most of my time; but not before working on the composition, world building, and cinematic approach.
Process Highlight
When possible, most of my assets were taken and modified from the Quixel library. However, the character and props were modelled, rigged and textured in Blender.
Shader Highlight
Similarly to the caustics shader in "The Last Voyage", the wind shader was a case of wanting to create an effect and finding the simplest and most efficient way to do so. I had done these before in 2D with a "trim path" in After Effect, so I felt the same strategy could be replicated in 3D.
The steps were pretty simple in the end, I modelled the "wind" shapes in Blender and imported them in Unreal. I then created the "trim" effect with a panning gradient generated by a mask moving along the mesh through Dynamic parameters controlled in Niagara.
A lot of fun and very satisfying!
Thank you for making it all the way to the end!
If you want to see more of my past and future projects, come and find me here on Artstation.
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